Older male workers have been opting for early retirement at an increasing rate, while at the same time, older females have been increasingly opting to continue working. A number of hypotheses have been offered for the trend toward early retirement among males, but none have provided a complete explanation. An explanation heretofore unexplored is that the availability of health insurance through their spouses employers allow workers to bridge the gap in insurance coverage until they are eligible for Medicare at age 65. It has been argued that legislation such as COBRA, that allows workers to continue to purchase health insurance through their former employer after leaving a job, has contributed to the secular trend in early retirement. Since obtaining family health insurance through a spouse's employer is even simpler than obtaining coverage under COBRA, it is likely that the availability of coverage from one's spouse also has an important effect on older workers decisions to work or to retire. Decisions about work and retirement and about health insurance affect not only the individual worker but also other members of the household. The analysis of labor force participation among older workers thus should incorporate the joint decisions about work and insurance of spouses or partners. We propose to investigate the retirement behavior of older males and females using data from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), which is a longitudinal survey of persons who were 51 to 61 years old in 1992. It contains information on work and retirement behavior, health insurance eligibility and coverage, and the usual household demographic information. This combination makes it ideal for our investigation of the effect of the availability of spouse health insurance coverage on retirement behavior. Preliminary results from the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS) and from the Current Population Survey (CPS) are consistent with our hypothesis. From the CPS, we have found that the household combination of the wife working and the husband not working has been the fastest-growing over time among 55-64 year olds. We also find from the CPS that rates of labor force withdrawal are higher among 50-59 year olds for those who are eligible for coverage under a spouse health insurance plan than for those who are not eligible. Finally, from the HRS, we find that a significant number of retired females and males are obtaining health insurance from their spouses.